Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life, announced in early December that they had two million users - and that they had gone from one million to two million users in barely eight weeks. Now, it's well known that judging MMORG users accurately is about as successful as herding cats, but it nevertheless made news.
The problem is that - much like Web 1.0's use of 'pageviews' as a correlate for unique users - equating registered users with active users is somewhere between disingenuous and dishonest, not to mention spurious. (A good article describing the pointless nature of total registered users can be found here). Attempts to render these figures into metrics more commonly used by the game industry have been notable for the lack of co-operation that Linden Labs provided.
Persistent efforts have finally resulted in Linden giving comparable numbers to Fortune magazine, and they break down as follows:
2.3 million 'Residents' (ie, total registered users)
1.5 million unique users
250,000 users have come back after initial log-in
25,000 active users
Churn rate (the percentage of users who leave to never come back) is etimated at 85% (relatively high by MMORG standards); maximum number of concurrent users is estimated at around 18,000 (quite low, by MMORG standards: World of Warcraft's equivalent value is 660,000).
The question of interest here would be: does this matter? And i think the answer - in spite of my lack of desire to participate in Second Life - is probably not. I think it comes down to 'what is Second Life?' If it's a game: then it is, notoriously, not a very good one - and not one people continue to play after their initial login. If, on the other hand, it is something else, then maybe this lack of participants doesn't matter - after all, not all beta tests have to be successful.
One gamer, taking aim at Second Life's dodgy statistics, wrote on her blog:
Look, it’s simple. Open ended virtual worlds like Second Life are best suited for the types of people who love to create content. ... [I]f you don’t have the time and patience to learn about modeling and animation tools, then you are going to log into Second Life, take a look around, scratch your head, shrug your shoulders, and log out again.
On the other hand, if you prefer to be a consumer of entertainment content, as I am, and as I suspect much of the world is, then games are your nectar of the gods. Give me laser guns and gory aliens that, when blasted, spill out gobs of fluorescent goo.
The contention that people don't want to create content can be argued, but the conclusion - that Second Life is not a game - seems solid to me. The answer, perhaps, can be found in an entertaining overview of the web in 2006 by Swiss-Japanese branding consultants Information Architects: they listed Second Life as one of their top 50 sites of the year - in the category of social networking:
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